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Creative Sues Apple
E IS mC(Square) writes "Looks like Apple's legal problems are not yet over. ZDNet reports that Creative has sued Apple over their iPod interface. From the article: 'Creative Technology said Monday that it has filed two legal actions against Apple Computer, charging the popular iPod infringes on its patented technology. ... In both cases, Creative says that the iPod and iPod Nano infringe on a patent the company has for the interface in its Zen media player, a patent granted last August.'"
The key word there is granted, not submitted.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If you can't beat them, sue them.. And give me 33%.
At a bar, I don't go right for the 10, I go for the 6 and drink until she's an 8.
Not very surprising. Will probably be modded flamebait, but..
Creative is used to having a hold on their market and killing off competition (ie, SoundStorm) by buying out companies or technologies they depend on. The result is them making sub-quality products and incremental upgrades that are *just* good enough for people to bother, and selling them for top dollar. And then shafting the customer with bad support on all but their latest product line.
So I can see why they don't know how to play fair and compete. They don't know how to handle Apple any other way.
because that worked oh so well for copyright.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
The column view (browser view) has been in NeXTSTEP since 1989. Apple acquired NeXT in the mid-90s. I do not say that Apple holds patent on it nor invented it (Xerox Smalltalk class browser?). I just want to say, that the column has been here for a while and it was somehow related to Apple too.
:-) It is the same to drill-down by region, store and date or by genre, artist and album. They are just different terms.
Moreover! Filtering data using a column view is also quite old. It has been used in data-warehousing as way of drilling-down. In the music player it is nothing more, nothing less: it is drilling-down through your song database. Just ask Bill Inmon or Ralph Kimball
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
After a little searching, I believe this is the patent.
United States Patent 6,928,433
Goodman , et al. August 9, 2005
Automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata
Abstract
A method, performed by software executing on the processor of a portable music playback device, that automatically files tracks according to hierarchical structure of categories to organize tracks in a logical order. A user interface is utilized to change the hierarchy, view track names, and select tracks for playback or other operations.
Inventors: Goodman; Ron (Santa Cruz, CA); Egan; Howard N. (Capitola, CA)
Assignee: Creative Technology LTD (Singapore, SG)
Appl. No.: 755723
Filed: January 5, 2001
If they submitted the patent before Apple started using the disputed aspects of it, then how is it a submarine patent? A submarine patent is one that's submitted, granted, and then quietly sat on by the holder until the covered tech has gained widespread adoption - then and only then do they start enforcing it, knowing that
.gif patent.
a) there are lots of targets
b) it'll be much more painful to remove/do without the patented tech than just pay-up
See for example the
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Oh, sure, column view is old hat. But a column-view MP3 player? Now that's original thinking.
And it's genius, too. I was riding on the subway the other day, listening to some tunes, bopping my head -- I had my headphones on, and I was carrying my NeXTstation under my right arm. (The monitor goes in my backpack.) Perfectly normal, right? Well, everyone was staring at my NeXTstation. Those things are hot and heavy. Anyway, it felt awkward (though a little kinky) to have everyone staring at my NeXTstation. The genius of Creative's MP3 player is that it gives you that great column view, but it fits in your pocket, so you don't have to deal with the awkwardness of people jealously eying your NeXTstation.
Patent No. 6,928,433 was filed in January 2001. Before the iPod was unveiled in October.
The site isn't available at the moment (Maximum number of users has been reached.) but it looked like a fairly typical old-method-but-for-new-technology patent. You know the type... "auction bidding... but on the Internet!".
At least, that is my theory.
I really doubt this is a money-grab-patent-trolling attempt, rather it is more likely Creative wants access to iTunes as settlement. That means being able to use Creative's players in iTunes and also the players being able to play FairPlay protected content.
If that is what Creative is gunning for, then I hope they get what they want as it would be a good thing for all of us.
Thankfully, the USPTO is a bit more like the rest of the world so this practice should now have stopped.
Creative first released their Nomad Jukebox products in early 2000:e .html
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http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2000/createjuk
The first iPod came out on October 23, 2001.
The Nomad Zen was a late 2002 product:
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/nomadzen.
Posters here already have identified the Creative patent as being one they filed on January 5, 2001. That was probably early in the design cycle for the Zen players, but before they actually were released.
I for one am glad to see Creative finally prosecuting Apple for all the technology they stole. Clearly Apple has been taking ideas from the superior Nomad products for quite some time now, and that's the only way they've been able to build the obviously derivative user interface used on the iPod.
(Note to self: turn down sarcasm knob a notch)
No, the iPod did not come out before the Creative's "high capacity" units. Creative's large storage mp3 players were on the market for almost 18 months before the iPod was publically announced, and with an interface that was almost identical to the "revolutionary" iPod interface. At the time, Zens were available in 5 and 10GB - while the iPod was 10, 15, and later 20.
The iPod was slimer, used a li-poly battery (instead of lithium-ion, resulting in many upset users) and the "click-wheel" technology, rather than traditional buttons. Other than that, they were about the same.
And the patent for the "hierarchical" (and lets face it, really really obvious) way of organizing music on a mobile player is what they're settling on. The filing date is much earlier, though it was pushed back and re-examined many times. That whole "Artist->Album->Song" method? Creative "invented" it, and God help you if you try and use it yourself in a mobile player and subsequently gain market share over them. Nevermind that it's the fundamental way that files have been stored and sorted on computers since...well...since we left punch cards behind, slapping "mobile" on the patent makes it new! So does slapping "online" apparently...
They sued now because prior to this, they'd been in negotiations with Apple for an out-of-court settlement for patent infringement. Apple finally flat out refuesd (on the grounds that the patent was "bullshit"), and left Creative little other options for taking their slice of someone else's pie. They'll probably hope that after a bit of bad press and a seemingly losing battle, Apple will decide to settle just to get on with it. Hopefully Apple won't cave, because as much as I hate those stupid white headphones, I hate patent mongering more.
Creative innovated too. Show me who did they copy the original SoundBlaster from, for example. I also think technically they invented the HDD-based MP3 player, _before_ Apple.
And more importantly the tended to offer products that offer a good bang-per-buck balance. Yes, it's easy to do the "bah, but <insert pro card costing 500$> sounded better or had lower latency" sneer, but from a more pragmatic point of view, Creative did an outstanding job of bridging the gap between pro equipment and the utter crap everyone else was selling.
It's pretty telling that even though virtually any modern motherboard comes with some Realtec or some such sound solution, people still buy SoundBlasters. Because invariably those on-board solutions sound like crap. The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal. And having actually tried some, let me assure you that the sound boards based on those Realtek, Cirrus Logic and whatnot chips don't sound any better.
I even went and bought an USB soundcard/headphones combo from Plantronics in my misguided days of trying to boycott Creative, and, honestly, for all the hype about USB being better because of not picking up EM stuff inside the computer, it actually sounded the worst. It was more of a white noise generator than anything else. _And_ it offered _nothing_ except a DAC on the USB bus. There was no way to get any effects out of it, in games or otherwise. There was not even any way to hook it to anything else (e.g., to speakers). Looking back in retrospect, it was just a waste of money, as eventhe lowest end Creative cards cost a lot less and I already had better headphones too.
And a lot of those supposedly better-than-Creative sound cards were just a case of fanboyism and Amiga persecution syndrome. E.g., I've actually had an Aureal Vortex based card -- you know, _the_ one that got everyone up in arms along the lines of "waah!! Creative killed Aureal Vortex!! They're evil!!" -- and frankly it wasn't half as great as it sounded on paper. All that reflection processing and whatnot, sure, sounded like a major technical achievement. In practice most of the time it just made it impossible to tell where the sound is coming from, or WTH did they think it reflected on over there to sound actually louder from there than the original sound. I.e., from the perspective of a gamer who lived or died by hearing the enemy's footsteps or gunfire, it actually was a bigger disadvantage than those no-frills DAC-on-a-card cards.
And so on.
Yes, I know it's slashdot and it's good for your karma to sneer at any corporation -- as long as it's not Apple --, not to mention to rehash variants of the same "alas, the only way to get ahead is to be a monopolist" fatalism and defeatism. But I'll go ahead and say that they (A) innovated plenty, and (B) at least in the sound card market, actually offered good bang/buck.
Where they lost it in the MP3 player market was being utterly clueless about user interfaces and, again, they got beaten in the bang/buck arena. Where Apple got ahead wasn't being the only ones who innovated, but in having an all around good product and placed just right. There were plenty who had ideas before Apple, believe it or not, and there were plenty who had one extra gimmic or advantage over the iPod. Where they failed was invariably having more disadvantages to make up for that. Some were a LOT bigger than an iPod (I still remember some, e.g., Archos ones which were bigger than a 3" hard drive!), some were actually a lot more expensive in the name of some gimmick noone needed, some had a crap user interface, and so on.
Creative's players, for example, tended to be both bigger _and_ have a crap interface, and some had other faults too. It wasn't lack of innovation, it was simply a combination of a flawed perception of the market and flawed execution.
Basically let's st
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But Im all for Creative getting a little justice out of this. Apple is a computer company then they come along and act like they invented portable media.
.mp3 device, new legal music software source - then designed, packaged and marketed them all together successfully.
.mp3 player market buying iPods would have bought any other kind of music player. Because of Apple's music platform, the unique and appealing iPod designs (not just small and/or light), and the healthy aftermarket of accessories, the .mp3 player scene is a lot healthier now than it would have been without the iPod. Millions of people who never would have bought a "Zen" DID buy iPods, and because of it will at least be aware that there are such devices as well as competition for the iPod.
.mp3 players, but like most businesses in this workaholic's valley, they can't see past this contrived slight of their intellectual property to the larger advantages of a market Creative could never have built on it's own.
Nice to see your idea of justice is based on...how a company "acts".
You know what? Apple did a better job of making stuff people want. Creative, for all their supposed groundbreaking innovation, didn't have the magic combination of marketing savvy, features, and product design that made the iPod popular.
The iPod wasn't a runaway hit because Apple stole Creative's heirarchically-organized system for obvious navigation or whatever - it's because Apple took all the pieces - jukebox software,
Apple helped create the market - it's not clear that the 80% of the
Creative should be thankful Apple has grown the market for
The people don't want DRM, they don't want iTunes upgrades removing features.
Guess what? The Creative Zen series is now infested with DRM and has lost features as well. I know because I got f%$^ed buying a Zen Sleek. And on the box it says "Win98/ME/2K/XP compatible". Great, I'm running Win2k. Get home and try to install the required interface software (no UMD device here, oh no). The installer comes up with "Incorrect Operating System". I say WTF? Double check the box "Win98/ME/2K/XP compatible". WTF again. Go to the Creative site, download the software from there, same s$%&. Email Creative asking WTF. Get a response 2 days later saying "To properly support PlayForSure the Zen product you purchased is only supported by Media Player 10, which requires Windows XP".
So I go back to the store I bought it and returned it, bought a NON-PlayForS$%t iRiver player instead. The funniest part was that the Zen Sleeks on the shelf when I went back had a sticker over the requirements on the back covering up the O/S section, it now says "Windows XP" only. Asses.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I don't want to start a flamewar over this, but why does the iTunes DRM especially 'suck'? As a consumer, I agree that DRM is generally a bad thing, but as DRMs go, FairPlay is pretty friendly:
You can play your track on up to five computers (and as many iPods as you like) at any one time.
You can cancel computers individually or reset your DRM account if you hit the 5 computer mark and are unable to play your music on a new computer. (Handy if you didn't get the chance to deauthorize your computer due to system failure).
You can burn CDs of the music you buy.
The underlying format, AAC, sounds good even at 128kbps. Not OGG good, I'll admit, but good enough for personal use.
Also, how can a DRM be open? An open DRM would be unprotectable, which sort of defeats the point! It'd be nice if the Big Boys were that dumb. Maybe you mean licensed, so other media players could play FairPlay protected files? Right now, the only system I have that can't play iTunes purchases (without circumventing the DRM) is Linux.
it is very zen that creative has patented the 'zen user interface'. and are now suing apple (which seems to have a good understanding of zen) for violating their 'zen patent'. such a thing is so very un-zen, that it becomes zen again. We are now watching a koan-wreck unfold before our eyes.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.